“Two weeks after the 2013 Pulitzers were announced, all five winning books have, in fact, seen an increase in sales. The numbers, however, are woefully underwhelming.”
Tag: 04.30.13
Navajo Nation Names Its First-Ever Poet Laureate
“The goal of designating a chief poet is ‘to encourage other Navajo poets, writers, film makers and artists to realize how important their work is to the continuance and growth of Navajo contemporary culture.'”
Music And The Improbability Of Copyright
“Is plagiarism inevitable in pop music? Thanks to combinatorics, the answer is certainly no for a song at full length. And the answer is probably still no if one focuses on just the heart of a song–whatever, legally speaking, that is. But even a genius would probably be unable to write a new pop song that doesn’t resemble some old one for at least a bar or two.”
What’s With All These Museums Dedicated To Disaster?
“Museums are a history of mankind. When that history is one that highlights the worst in human beings rather than best, it cannot be positive.”
Smithsonian Begins Closing Galleries Due To Sequester
“The Smithsonian Institution announced last night that parts of three museums – the Hirshhorn, National Museum of African Art, and Smithsonian – will close [May 1] through Sept. 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider.”
Bad Spouses, Good TV: The Fascinating Rise Of Antihero Marriages
“Both the power-seeking political couple of House of Cards and the covert Russian spies of The Americans are equal parts business partners and soulmates. Because of each person’s reliance on the other to achieve mutual goals, both couples navigate the marital minefields of betrayal and infidelity in unusual ways. Both are the most fun to watch when they’re being bad together.”
What LA’s Brooklyn Festival Says About The Future Of Classical Music
“But the fertile interaction of classical and rock music evident in the Brooklyn Festival is hardly confined to that borough, or even to New York. It simply exemplifies a reality in which contemporary musicians work, and signals an imminent future in which even classical music’s flagship organizations — symphony orchestras and opera companies — will be forced to reconsider the genre boundaries that so long destructively divided classical and pop musics.”
The End Of Privacy
“Drones in public discourse appear to have become a symbol of an inchoate fear of a future in which privacy is nonexistent. This is not an unreasonable fear, but it is somewhat anachronistic, because in reality that future is already here–not because of drones, but because of pervasive video recording, RFID systems, massive data collection systems, and other, less obtrusive technologies.”
The Very First Web Page Returns To The Internet (Here’s What It Looks Like)
“The site has been reconstructed from an archive hosted on the W3C site, so what you’re seeing is a 1992 copy of the first website. Sadly this is, thus far, the earliest copy anyone can find, though the team at CERN is hoping to turn up an older copy.”
Hollywood Actors Might Be Good For Broadway Box Office, But They Get No Tony Love
“Most of the actors who landed nominations Tuesday morning have been toiling in theater in recent years. The Hollywood actors who made up the 2012-2013 Broadway class? They were almost nowhere to be seen.”